To this popular view of the character Mrs. Kemble, in her notes on Shakespeare, gives vivacious expression. Here we are told that Lady Macbeth was not only devoid of “all the peculiar sensibilities of her sex,” but that she was actually incapable of the feelings of remorse. The sleepless madness of her closing hours was not, so we are assured, the result of conscious guilt, for that was foreign to her nature: it resembled rather the nightmare of a butcher who is haunted by the blood in which his hands are imbrued. And as to her death, it was due in no degree to the anguish of a stricken soul, but was in some occult way directly traceable to the unconquerable wickedness of her heart.
“I think,” writes Mrs. Kemble, with the eager interest of a scientific inquirer on the track of a new poison, “her life was destroyed by sin as by a disease of which she was unconscious, and that she died of a broken heart, while the impenetrable resolution of her will remained unbowed. The spirit was willing, but the flesh was weak; the body can sin but so much and survive; and other deadly passions besides those of violence and sensuality can wear away its fine tissues and undermine its wonderful fabric. The woman’s mortal frame succumbed to the tremendous weight of sin and suffering which her immortal soul had power to sustain; and having destroyed its temporal house of earthly sojourn, that soul, unexhausted by its wickedness, went forth into its new abode of eternity.”
Allowing for a certain feminine vehemence in the wording of the indictment, this view of Lady Macbeth can scarcely be said to exaggerate the current conception of her character. That it represents a somewhat grotesque caricature of Shakespeare’s marvellous creation, will plainly appear from even the most cursory examination of the text, and has, indeed, already been pointed out on more than one occasion. In 1867 Mr. P. W. Clayden, in the Fortnightly Review, made a praiseworthy attempt to revive the finer outlines of Shakespeare’s portrait, an attempt in which he had already been forestalled by Mr. Fletcher in the Westminster Review for 1844, and by a writer in the National Review for 1863.
The only reproach that can fairly be brought against the last-named article, which for the rest deserves to rank as a careful and searching piece of criticism, is that it has too much the tone of being delivered as a brief in the lady’s favour. The advocacy of her cause, and the consequent denunciation of the character of her husband, are both in a style that seems rather to blur the imaginative beauty of the picture as a whole. We are made to feel that we are sitting in a court of law rather than at a poet’s feet, and we are sharply reminded of the somewhat inappropriate arena into which the discussion has drifted by the writer’s concluding assertion, that Macbeth was “one of the worst villains” ever drawn by Shakespeare. Charges of this sort smack too strongly of the forensic method, and have but little significance when applied to the central figure of a great tragedy. If Macbeth stood at the bar of the Old Bailey he would undoubtedly be convicted of murder, and so, for that matter, would his wife; but it is the poet’s privilege to lift the record of crime into an ideal atmosphere; and when, at the magic bidding of genius, the closest secrets of the human heart have been unlocked, and its inner workings laid bare, such epithets as may be used to dismiss the record of a police case cease to be instructive, and are scarcely even relevant to the wider issue that has been raised. The character of Iago, with whom Macbeth is compared, stands on different ground. It was there no part of Shakespeare’s task to lift the impenetrable mask of malice which serves as the instrument of Othello’s destruction. Iago is known to us only by his pitiless delight in human torture, and by the sinister cruelty of which he stands accused and convicted; while in the case of Macbeth, despite his heavier record of actual crime, the evil that he wrought serves only as the stepping-stone by which we are allowed to enter into the deeper recesses of his soul.
But there is one point in the article to which we have referred that has a profound interest for the student of the drama. It is the writer’s main contention that the source of the error he seeks to correct is to be traced to what he terms a distortion of the stage. The figure of Lady Macbeth as now popularly accepted is represented as the lineal descendant of the genius of Mrs. Siddons. It was her incomparable art which first gave to the character the particular stamp it now bears, and chased from the popular imagination the more delicate creation of the poet’s brain. This charge carries with it, of course, a splendid tribute to the artist’s powers, and the experience of our own time proves that it may not be altogether unfounded. It is not so long ago since the glamour of Salvini’s genius, with its superb gifts of voice and bearing and its incomparable technical resource, succeeded in effacing the Othello of Shakespeare, leaving us in its stead a figure admirably effective for the purposes of the stage, but sadly lacking in the higher and finer elements with which the character had been endowed by the author. And it may be added that the witness of contemporaries goes far to support this particular view of Mrs. Siddons’ performance of the part. The poet Campbell testifies to the extraordinary impression she created when he writes that “the moment she seized the part she identified her image with it in the minds of the living generation.” Boaden, her earlier biographer, speaking of her first entrance on the scene, says, “The distinction of sex was only external; ‘her spirits’ informed their tenement with the apathy of a demon”; and evidence to the same effect is supplied by the interesting notes of Professor Bell, first published some few years ago by Professor Fleeming Jenkin.
“Of Lady Macbeth,” he writes, “there is not much in the play, but the wonderful genius of Mrs. Siddons makes it the whole. She makes it tell the whole story of the ambitious project, the disappointment, the remorse, the sickness and despair of guilty ambition, the attainment of whose object is no cure for the wounds of the spirit. Macbeth in Kemble’s hand is only a co-operating part. I can conceive Garrick to have sunk Lady Macbeth as much as Mrs. Siddons does Macbeth, yet when you see Mrs. Siddons play the part you scarcely can believe that any acting could make her part subordinate. Her turbulent and inhuman strength of spirit does all. She turns Macbeth to her purpose, makes him her mere instrument, guides, directs, and inspires the whole plot. Like Macbeth’s evil genius, she hurries him on in the mad career of ambition and cruelty from which his nature would have shrunk.”
If this was really the impression produced by Mrs. Siddons—and the Professor’s notes are in close accord with Boaden’s description of her as “an exulting savage”—it only proves how potent a factor in the art of the stage is the unconscious and inevitable intrusion of the actor’s personality. For this creature of “turbulent and inhuman strength of spirit” was not at all what Mrs. Siddons in her critical moments conceived Lady Macbeth to be. Her recorded memoranda exhibit a widely different interpretation, and contain, indeed, much penetrating criticism on the general scope and purpose of the play. Even the physical image of Lady Macbeth, as it presented itself to her imagination, was strangely unlike the threatening and commanding figure which she actually presented on the stage. She thought of her as embodying a type of beauty “generally allowed to be most captivating to the other sex, fair, feminine, nay, perhaps even fragile”—a description which calls from her biographer the almost indignant protest that “the public would ill have exchanged such a representation for the dark locks and eagle eyes of Mrs. Siddons.” But the most remarkable feature of her criticism lies in its constant insistence upon the essentially feminine nature of Lady Macbeth. Speaking of her entrance in the Third Act, she pictures in a few eloquent words the sudden change which the haunting memory of crime has already wrought in her character. “The golden round of royalty now crowns her brow and royal robes enfold her form, but the peace which passeth all understanding is lost to her for ever, and the worm that never dies already gnaws her heart.” And, again, still treating of this same scene, the most deplorably pathetic in all tragedy, “she exhibits for the first time striking indications of sensibility, nay, tenderness and sympathy; and I think this conduct is nobly followed up by her during the whole of their subsequent eventful intercourse.” Not less striking is the keen perception which these notes exhibit of the terrible anguish of the woman herself: “Her feminine nature, her delicate structure, it is too evident, are soon overwhelmed by the enormous pressure of her crimes.... She knows by her own woeful experience the torments he undergoes, and endeavours to alleviate his sufferings.”
But there is one sentence in these notes more pregnant with meaning than all the rest. “The different physical powers of the two sexes,” she writes, “are finely delineated in the different effects which their mutual crimes produce.” Here in a few words is to be found the key that will unlock the heart of the tragedy. Not merely the different physical powers, but also, and with even a deeper truth, the different mental and moral characteristics of the two sexes in the presence of crime, are here illustrated by Shakespeare with unsurpassable force and delicacy. This is the imaginative theme which his transcendent genius has fastened upon the legend of Macbeth, and there is scarcely a line of the play which can be rightly understood until we realise that the two central figures are, and are deliberately intended to be, the embodiment and expression of the contrasted characteristics of sex. To argue that Lady Macbeth is not truly and typically a woman, is to destroy at one blow the delicate fabric which the poet has been at such pains to construct: to strive to vindicate the character of her husband at her expense, is but a vain endeavour to break through the empire of crime which sways and dominates the lives of both. There is here, indeed, no question of moral rescue for either; and it were idle to debate what he or she might have been under different conditions. For, as Shakespeare has conceived the action of the story, the shadow of guilt hangs from the first like a murky cloud in the sky, and the invisible hands of fate have drawn the net of evil closely around them long ere they appear upon the scene. But, accepting these conditions, with the transformation of individual character which they imply, Macbeth stands out among the works of Shakespeare as a sublime study of sexual contrast, a superb embodiment of the force and the weakness of the conjugal relation.
Coleridge has aptly observed that the dominant note of the tragedy is struck in its opening lines. The appearance of the supernatural agents of evil serves to set the framework of the picture: their choppy fingers have already drawn the magic circle of malignant fate around the caged souls of Macbeth and his partner, who are henceforth to be prisoners in a world where “fog and filthy air” exclude the purer light of heaven, a world in which the moral order of the universe is upturned, and where “fair is foul and foul is fair.” The whole after-action of the story passes in this darkened and shadowed light: the forms of the principal characters starting out from a background of crime, illumined as by the lurid gleam of a stormy sunset whose clouds drip blood. And as the play advances the scene seems gradually shifted into some unknown latitude of eternal night, where the voices of nature are made to chorus the direful music of the witches’ incantation. Throughout the drama this dominant note of evil is kept constantly vibrating. Even for those whose hearts are free the poisoned air seems to carry some taint of infection, and the imagination shudders at the uneasy forebodings that haunt the soul of Banquo, who fears to trust his assured integrity to the attacks of the secret agents of the dark.
Hold, take my sword.—There’s husbandry in heaven,